Sunday, August 04, 2013

Queue, the Pastime

The morning after Catherine and Andrew's wedding was full of people lolling around in one state or another trying to decide what to do. It took considerable time to get a taxi back to Cambridge which was clogged with people and traffic. The train ride to London gave me a chance to catch up on some sleep. Yet - where did the day go? Into the ether no doubt. The ether that I had apparently inhaled so deeply as to take well into the day before I felt awake.

My first task was so pedestrian it hardly seems worth mentioning. My phone's SIM was empty and needed a top-up which I duly discovered I had to do in a Vodafone shop in person. A pedestrian task that took plenty of walking and most of the day. Now I could use the phone's maps and call Aunt Stephanie unsuccessfully (several failed attempts). I'll seek some assistance from a local in the morning.

The rest of the day was walking and queuing. It was an attempt to see some free public art - the Dalton House, a quirky and humorous optical illusion on an empty lot in Islington. I walked for about 30 minutes only to find there would be a 2-1/2 hour wait. Then I discovered it was a 30-minute wait at the nearby pub where I thought I could spend an hour or so. I gave up and walked dejectedly for another 30 minutes back to the Tube stop whereupon some 50,000 Arsenal fans had made an immense queue to get on the subway. It took almost an hour just to get to the platform. I hope I never experience anything like it again.

By the time I got back to the hotel, I was well done. So far the London parts of the trip have been a bit of a bust. The most infuriating thing however is having paid for a massive phone plan, and the crap Android thing I'm using is terrible. It can't stay connected to any network for more than a few minutes (Wi-Fi or 3G) and it is miserably slow to load even simple pages and it is horrible at connecting to e-mail servers (seems an Android thing whereby it doesn't maintain the login credentials thus won't send anything even though it can receive it?!!)

Mostly this means buggered up Web connections that are hampering me at every turn. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.